The invention relates to an indicator for cooking appliances with at least one partly transparent or translucent, upper surface. The term "cooking appliances" includes hotplates for cooking, heating and baking purposes. The upper surface can itself be a cooking surface, such as e.g. in the case of a glass ceramic plate, but can also be a mounting plate, e.g. of hard glass, in which the hotplates are mounted. It has already been proposed (U.S. patent application Ser. No. 407,205 filed on Sept. 14, 1989 by Gerhard GOESSLER and Ortwin SCHAN (allowed)), to surround the heating unit of a cooking appliance with illuminating or lighting means, namely a light guide, which has several light outputs on its circumference. It is able to indicate different states on the cooking appliance.
It is also known to place a signal lamp on the outer circumference of a heating unit (DE-A-35 01 365). It is also known to illuminate the area around a heating unit by a central lamp with a low reflector (GB-B-1 346 574).
German utility model 19 49 906 describes a cooking appliance having a top surface with different windows around several cooking plates, which window can be illuminated by different lamps if the cooking plate is switched on.
These devices suffer from the disadvantage that they are in part too complicated, have an excessive overall height or do not have an adequate indicating function. It is in fact desired to bring the indication or display into a form corresponding to what naturally happens in the case of a heated cooking utensil, i.e. for illumination to occur where it is warm or hot, whilst the indication or display is readily visible.